unlike my poor neighbors, our power never went out...yet. Probably because I stockpiled water in fear of my pump not running on the well (I guess I could have gone to the neighbors' house to borrow a cup of water)

Much better off than my bro (and about 40,000+ others) in St. Joe. That is a mess!

Nothing like the weather yo-yoing to make your sinuses revolt. I'd feel sorry for you, Badger, if I weren't lust after your weather. I possess an arsenal of sinus remedies so I'm ready for a bit of yo-yo over what we've had.

I was wondering whether Lawrence got the freezing rain. I saw on our news that Oklahoma and Iowa were in bad shape. We got a bit of rain here last night and the streets are a terrible mess with all the slush and dirt. Had to keep my windscreen wipers on this morning while out and about. Or should that be oot and aboot. :o)

this question seems a day late and a hailstone short. jonas with his hindsight 20/20 called it! yaay, you've just won: all expense paid trip with katie horner to cuba missouri. yaay!

yes, snappie, merrill's vision of america is that we all should live a third-world existence with rolling power outages to force power conservation. he believes in very very big government! he also believes broken streets serve a useful function as traffic constipating devices. and, if those weren't enough, he also praises the terrorists blowing up our troops in iraq, calling them "patriots." no one should pay him one second's respect, and he should be driven from human society.

Last year, we got our requisite baby ice storm. On Day 2, I decided to head in to work around 10, figuring that the crews had had enough time to clear the roads (they had; it was a blissful easy commute because everyone else was still hiding from the ice!). I put on my coat and hat and gloves, specially dug out for this purpose, and went out to scrape my car. My next door neighbor was cursing and screaming at his windshield, which he said he'd been scraping for ten full minutes. I caught him with the pot of steaming water just in time to prevent a minor catastrophe and made him put it down. He watched me for about thirty seconds and then said, "What's that you're doing? I've never seen anyone do that before."

I said, "You mean tapping it?"

My lifelong Austinite neighbor (who is, lucky for him, moving to Hawaii next spring) had never actually seen anyone lightly tapping the windshield with the point of the scraper to build cracks in the ice. He was just trying to scrape through it with brute force and a plastic pancake turner so he could get to the grocery store because he was out of beer and firewood (we all buy those one-shot firewood packs when it goes below 60). He also looked like someone had finally explained particle physics to him when I turned on the car (and rear defroster) to let it warm up while I de-iced my windows.

He asked if they teach about learning to de-ice a car in Driver's Ed. I said no, our parents usually make us start scraping the windshield as soon as we're tall enough to reach the middle of it...

He said he told everyone at work about 'that tapping trick' and they all agreed it was a great idea.